Dakota County and Mendota Heights Continue to Grapple with Heavy Snowfalls

There’s little that Todd Howard can do, besides cross his fingers and hope that February and March will be blizzard-free.

Howard is the assistant county engineer for Dakota County. Frequent and heavy snows this winter all but exhausted the county’s $900,000 budget for road salt and incurred more than $125,000 in overtime pay for the county’s snowplow drivers in 2010, Howard said.

Dakota County’s budget operates around the calendar year, which means the county has to make its snowplowing dollars stretch through the winter months early in the year and into November and December. Howard is concerned that the money the county has allocated for snowplowing in 2011 will dry up quickly if the area sees more heavy snow early this year.

“If it stops snowing now, we’re in great shape,” Howard said. “If it continues to snow, and we get hit again in November and December, we’ll be tough shape.”

The 24 plow trucks the county owns are responsible for clearing roughly 1,100 miles of road, Howard said. In an average winter, the county sends those trucks out 32 times for “snow events”—snowfall heavy enough to warrant plowing. Already this year, the county has experienced 31 snow events, Howard said, with more likely to come in February and March. Many of those snowfalls, he said, occurred on weekends or outside of regular work hours, which means the county had to pay its plow crews that much more overtime.

“Our guys have pretty much being gong nonstop since Thanksgiving,” said Mendota Heights Public Works Director John Mazzitello. In Mendota Heights, he’s recorded 26 snow events that required city staff to plow or salt roads, and 14 of those have occurred since the New Year began.

He said Public Works Superintendent Tom Olund has sent staff home during the day in preparation for a night of work to make sure they’re rested.

“They’re holding up real well,” said Olund. The department has received a number of compliments for their work this winter, an unusual phenomenon for public works crews, who usually go unnoticed when at their best.

These snowfalls have taken a bigger hit on the city's budget because many of them have been at night and on holidays and weekends. “Murphy’s Law is fully in play,” said Mazzitello.

“We’re within tolerances for overtime right now,” said Mazzitello. “How that would impact us down the road is next winter when we have overtime.”

As for equipment, a in December is back up and running. Despite careful maintenance of some older equipment, Mazzitello said wear and tear is accumulating, and will be dealt with in the spring.

For now, the city’s salt supply is stable, in part because the crews are mixing sand into the salt to make it last longer.

As for the county, it’s been years since the county used up its road salt budget, Howard said.

”I’m very concerned with us already having 31 events,” Howard said. “We’re almost to an average year, and we know we’re going to get [snow] events in February and March.”

“We’ll deal with that as it comes,” said Mazzitello. “The most important thing is we take care of the road and the utilities and plowing the streets, and if we have to adjust our budget to take care of the streets then that’s what we have to do.”